The rapid evolution of software can leave many customers with patchwork systems for handling business data, programs and user access. While this may not critically impact the large industrial customers this can have a significant impact on the small business owner. For example, point-of-sale (POS) and front/back office business applications are very powerful tools to a small business owner as the combination offers elegant and exceptional ways to manage retail store front and back office operations. However, the POS and business applications are not integrated. Today, the front and back office operations are often broken forcing the user to manage these applications through cumbersome manual processes that take significant time away from business issues, and more importantly, do not provide convenient solutions for the user to analyze and improve performance.
Additionally, data synchronization and application interaction then becomes problematic when trying to get these systems to intercommunicate data and functions, for example. When systems do not effectively and efficiently interface, the user can be forced to manually make these processes work by interactively running programs, transferring data, writing additional patchwork programs, etc. This becomes exceedingly onerous where the business data and functionality can reside on distributed data systems or clients within one location or several locations.